The 13th
October is Ada Lovelace Day which is an international celebration of the
achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM). She was a Guildford resident and is credited
with creating the first computer programmer and this year it is 200 years since
she was born.
History of Ada Lovelace
She was born
Ada Gordon in 1815, sole child of
the brief and tempestuous marriage of the poet George Gordon, Lord Byron, and his mathematics-loving wife Annabella
Milbanke. Fearing that Ada would inherit her father’s volatile ‘poetic’
temperament, her mother raised her under a strict regimen of science, logic,
and mathematics. Ada herself from childhood had a fascination with machines–
designing fanciful boats and steam flying machines, and pouring over the
diagrams of the new inventions of the Industrial Revolution that filled the
scientific magazines of the time. She spent her childhood at what is now Horsley Towers, Horsley, Surrey.
At the age of
19 she was married to an aristocrat, William King; when King was made Earl of
Lovelace in 1838 his wife became Lady Ada King, Countess of Lovelace. She
had three children. In 1833, Lovelace’s mentor, the scientist and
polymath Mary Sommerville, introduced her to Charles Babbage, the Lucasian
Professor of Mathematics who had already attained considerable celebrity for
his visionary and perpetually unfinished plans for gigantic clockwork
calculating machines. Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace both had somewhat
unconventional personalities and became close and lifelong friends. Babbage
described her as “that Enchantress who has thrown her magical spell around the
most abstract of Sciences and has grasped it with a force which few masculine
intellects could have exerted over it,” or an another occasion, as “The
Enchantress of Numbers”.
Lovelace was
deeply intrigued by Babbage’s plans for a tremendously complicated device he
called the ‘Analytical Engine’, which was to combine the array of adding gears
of his earlier Difference Engine with an elaborate punchcard operating system.
It was never built, but the design had all the essential elements of a modern
computer.
In 1842
Lovelace translated a short article describing the Analytical Engine by the Italian
mathematician Luigi Menabrea, for publication in England. Babbage asked her to
expand the article, “as she understood the machine so well”. The final article
is over three times the length of the original and contains several early
‘computer programs,’ as well as striking observations on the potential uses of
the machine, including the manipulation of symbols and creation of music.
Although Babbage and his assistants had sketched out programs for his engine
before, Lovelace’s are the most elaborate and complete, and the first to be
published; so she is often referred to as “the first computer
programmer”.
The Analytical
Engine remained a vision, until
Lovelace’s notes became one of the most critical documents to inspire Alan
Turing’s work on the first modern computers in the 1940s.
